Hi, from my experience, after developing various wordpress themes & wordpress theme framework. If i talk about some of the free plugins that i used most during the theme development, i will name the few.

This plugin allows you to add custom fields in the post, page etc. and then we can use the custom field values using the php functions provided by the ACF. It is very easy to use. After installing the plugin you will be provided with the GUI to add the custom field & then you can select where this custom field should appear whether it should appear in post, page etc. Steps to use this plugin:

![](/img/options-framework.png)
The one thing that we more often see in the premium themes is theme options. To do so in our theme we can this free wordpress plugin. Getting started with this plugin is very easy.

The options framework makes use of the options.php file, which should be under the activated theme root directory, if it it is not there, download this file & copy it under the activated theme root directory (make sure it is named options.php).

After that you can see the theme options under appearance -> theme options

You can add/remove options using the options.php

The code to display any option value in the default or custom template will look like this:

As described in the wordpress plugin repository, WCK is a must have tool for creating custom fields, custom post types and taxonomies, fast and without any programming knowledge & that is true to great extent. Using this plugin is easy too.

As you can create custom fields, custom post types & taxonomies with this plugin, i will try to explain this plugin by creating the custom taxonomy( it is a way to group things together, like you may have seen the tags to the right side of every post in the wordpress post editor).

As described in the wordpress plugin repository, Search & Filter is a simple search and filtering plugin for WordPress - it is an advancement of the WordPress search box. And this is a great plugin. Getting started is really easy.